Certain critical events such as certain natural or man-made disasters, major accidents or terrorist attacks, as well as the response to these events, bring about a wireless telecommunications imbalance whereby a small geographic area can experience a sudden and substantial increased demand for wireless services. In the minutes and hours following such an event, a large volume of people require wireless telecommunications services in a very limited geographical area. Unfortunately, a large number of potential calls, many among them important calls related to health or safety, will not make it through to their destination due to insufficient wireless capacity in the vicinity of the event site.
In an effort to alleviate the communications difficulties that such a situation can create, certain wireless telecommunications providers have opted to create a system whereby in an emergency, the capacity of the wireless network in the vicinity of the emergency would be exclusively reserved for authorized emergency services personnel. In so doing, existing calls would be dropped, and only authorized personnel would be permitted to place new ones. Unfortunately, this solution ignores a practical reality, namely that many important calls placed immediately following a major disaster event are likely to come both from authorized personnel, and from emergency personnel who are not on the applicable work shift using their private cell phones, for example. Other calls tend to be placed by eyewitnesses who are able to give descriptions of ongoing situations above or under the ground, where emergency personnel are not necessarily present and from victims isolated or trapped by the disaster event. Thus, it is illusory and unwise to assume that reserving the wireless spectrum exclusively for authorized personnel during an emergency would achieve the goal of increased public safety. Furthermore, just as a disaster event creates a heavy load on the public network around the disaster site, it can also generate a heavy load on any emergency network in place across the city, state or country in which the event site is located.
In view of these and other inadequacies of prior art solutions, the need remains to improve the management of a wireless network in the vicinity of a location where the demand for wireless services is expected to rise abruptly, particularly following a critical event such as a disaster.